Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [32]
But it seemed just as likely that it might have been compressed air everywhere. The Niagara Falls Power Company’s engineers received much conflicting advice from the engineers of the day when they held an international competition for ideas on how to develop the falls and transmit its power. The submissions they received used alternating current, direct current, and compressed air. Victor Popp argued strenuously that compressed air should be used in the power project precisely because it could be “absolutely based on experience. Nothing must be new or untried in machinery, or even of exceptional dimensions.”14 Popp and his collaborator, A. Riedler of Berlin, put forth a proposal, based on their experience in Paris, showing how the system could work. Representatives of the Niagara Falls Power Company had even visited Popp in Paris to see the system for themselves in 1890. A consensus was building to use compressed air to transmit power from the Falls to Buffalo.15
But in the summer of 1891 a German team built a hundred-mile alternating current, high-voltage, three-phase transmission line from a hydro generator to Frankfurt. It had an efficiency of 75 percent. No compressed air system could come close. The original compressed air plan was tossed out and polyphase AC transmission continues to rule the grid to this day.16
The point of this history is not to suggest that electricity wasn’t ultimately a better system. As engineers figured out how to run higher voltage power lines, the amount of power that electrical wires can transmit with little loss became astonishingly large. Modern transmission and distribution systems can carry hundreds of thousands of megawatts across whole states while losing less than 10 percent of the energy that was pumped into the system.17 Imagining a hydraulic or pneumatic system that could work as well is difficult.
But however preordained electricity’s preeminence may seem with the benefit of hindsight, people at the time weren’t really sure if electrical transmission over long distances would work until the Niagara Falls power station proved it could. Even after that, many questions remained : Would it be safe? Would it last? Could their employees learn to work with it? How much would it cost?
Technology historian Eric Schatzberg has noted that many accounts of why one technology wins out over another depend too much on uncertain cost data about what technology was and would be cheaper. What he notes for the trolley industry was true for the transmission of power, too. Schatzberg related that
although electricity ultimately proved cheaper than all alternatives in terms of costs per passenger mile, comparative costs do not provide a sufficient historical explanation for the success of electric traction. Reliable comparisons of the actual costs of competing systems were almost unknown, especially comparisons that accounted fully for capital costs and depreciation. Predictions of future costs of competing technologies were even more uncertain. 18
No one knew how good electricity and compressed air could get as carriers of energy. Modern historians tend to see compressed air as a transitional technology between the gearing, shafts, and muscle power of the nineteenth century, but some contemporaries saw compressed air as newer than electricity. Conditioned with the techno-optimism of the time, they saw pneumatics as the next-generation power after electricity.
In fact, one compendium of technical achievements called compressed air “a new force which is coming into general use, and is regarded by some people as likely to become a rival to electricity.”19 An 1896 New York Times article forewarned,